Mycelium Ex Machina (Chernobyl)

[Kaelan]

Kaelan slung the sample bag over his shoulder, the sample tubes rattling faintly against each other inside the pack. Every footstep he took up the stairwell echoed sharply, unnervingly loud in the stillness of the pump station. He was breathing hard, not from exertion, but from that gnawing sensation at the base of his skull, the one that told him he was being watched.

He could hear the slow, wet drip of unseen water down in the darkness behind him. Every so often, his Geiger counter muttered a warning: a sharp click-click-click that seemed to nudge him faster.

The daylight was a pale smear above him, growing closer with every step, until…

He stopped.

There, perched neatly on the top step, was something that hadn’t been there before.

It was a rock. Rough-edged, small enough to fit in his hand. Someone—or something—had painted it: an ugly smear of pink, and over it, crude green polka dots that clustered at one end like diseased eyes. The colors were wrong, too bright, almost wet, and the arrangement gave the vague impression of a distorted, laughing face.
Kaelan stared at it. His gloved hand hovered at his side.

The stairs behind him stretched downward into the dark like a throat. No one had passed him. He was sure of that. Wasn’t he?

The pump station was supposed to be abandoned. His guide had said so. His permit allowed him alone inside. And yet here was this—this thing, grinning down at him like a child’s fevered nightmare, left like an offering.
He crouched slowly, examining it closer. The paint was fresh. Not years old. Recent. It gleamed in the low light.

Kaelan’s first instinct was to leave it, to step over it and run. But another part of him—the part that was never quite afraid enough—thought: It’s a sign. It’s a marker. Or a gift.

And whatever force governed this rotted land, it might not look kindly on a gift refused.

He reached out, wrapped his gloved fingers around the rock, and lifted it. It was heavier than he expected, warm to the touch, as if it had been resting in the crook of a living hand instead of the cold concrete stair. He slipped it into an empty specimen pouch and zipped it closed.

For documentation purposes. Of course.

Kaelan didn’t look behind him as he emerged into the gray daylight.

CHERNOBYL, ZONE ONE – MID MORNING

Kaelan skirted the shattered roadways, walking in a long arc that pointed vaguely toward the reactor, though he had no intention of getting anywhere near the monolith itself. The air grew damper as he moved, the sky above dull and low, as if the heavens had sagged under the weight of all that had happened here.

The ground under his boots softened into slick mud and frozen silt. Patches of marshland had overtaken the landscape in the decades since the disaster. Pools of stagnant water shimmered under the thin crust of ice, broken reeds jutting up like snapped bones.

This was where he would find it, if it existed: the radiotrophic fungus, the dark, resilient colonies feeding off decay and ruin. Wet, rotten places gave birth to such things. It was only natural.

He crouched often, scanning the bases of half-collapsed walls, overturned concrete blocks, and the gnarled trunks of trees that leaned like drunkards into the waterlogged earth. His Geiger counter clicked softly at his hip, steady, but alert. The marsh was quieter than the ruins. No birds. Few insects. Only the slow drip of thawing ice from broken pipes and skeletal trees.

He shifted through tufts of moss with a gloved hand, poked at clumps of saturated soil with a plastic probe.

Nothing yet.

His breath fogged the inside of his mask as he moved toward a low embankment where a fallen radio tower leaned precariously over a black pool of meltwater. Vines… or something pretending to be vines… crawled up its rusting lattice.

Kaelan leaned closer to the base of the structure, his a trained low scanning the shadows, searching for the telltale signs of spore mats. His focus narrowed to a hand-span of ground, breath tight with anticipation.

That's when something brushed against his mask.

He flinched back violently, stumbling and nearly falling into the muck. His flashlight swung wide, catching on the source.

A spider’s web, vast and delicate, strung between two pieces of broken rebar, stretched invisibly across the path. Thick with frost, the web caught the light and glistened like silver wire. Hanging motionless at its center was the architect: a spider, grotesquely bloated and glassy with cold, suspended in death or hibernation, its legs curled inward in an obscene embrace.

Kaelan’s heart hammered against his ribs. He clawed at his mask reflexively, wiping at it though he knew nothing had gotten inside. The spider hung inches from where his face had just been.

He staggered back, chest heaving. His gloved hands shook, not from the cold, but from the sudden surge of pure, primal panic.

"Get a grip,” he hissed to himself, his voice muffled by the mask. He cast one last glance at the web, as if expecting the spider to twitch and lunge, before he moved around it in a wide arc, putting as much distance between himself and the thing as the terrain allowed.

Still trembling, he returned his attention to the marsh.

The land grew rougher here: pockmarked with sinkholes, slick with frozen algae. Abandoned power pylons leaned at wrong angles against the winter sky. Even the trees, blackened and split open by invisible rot, looked alien.

Kaelan stooped beside a shallow pool where mold seemed to film the water’s surface in a strange, oily iridescence. He peeled a sample of the dark residue into a container. It wasn’t what he had come for—but it was something.
And something, in this place, was often worse than nothing.

He sealed the sample carefully, marking it with shaking hands. In his peripheral vision, something moved. A ripple in the reeds, the impression of a shadow much larger than any dog or fox.

Kaelan stood frozen for several long moments, eyes darting between the murky pools and the broken lines of the landscape. Nothing emerged. Nothing revealed itself.

Still, the sense of being watched prickled at the back of his neck.